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Sure. You should include total cost for the trade, including - commission - cancel charges - whether your order will get sent to all exchanges (one of my brokers won't send to BOX) - whether your order will participate in PIP - whether your order will get sent to the exchange with the best...

Schwab StreetSmartPro (which is a stripped-down version of the Cybertrader platform) lets you choose, by ticking a check box, whether the p/l display should use extended hours prices or closing prices.

Does it have to be either/or? One of my brokers allows you to choose whether the positions window shows current or end-of-day values based on whether you check a box or not.

One thing I noticed last week was that SPY calls were much more expensive than puts. With SPY at $138.00, Nov 138 calls cost $1.50 but Nov 138 puts only cost $1.20. So if you bought a synthetic long, it'd cost .40 or so and I suspect it would have nonzero theta.

Zecco and Bank of America have free trades now, although the number of free trades per month is limited (and in the case of BoA, you have to have $25K sitting in a deposit account). I don't know how good their fills are.

I'm sure they'll do whatever is in the best interests of their retail customers.

Well, my chart says 11720.45, but close enough. I was going to start a rant here this morning after the CNBC commentators were all breathlessly talking about possibly breaking out the champagne later today. Does anybody except the WSJ and their partners (like CNBC) care about how the Dow...

Looks pretty weak recently. Today, S&P up 9 points, crude up 1%, and OIH and XLE are *down*. (And would be down even further were it not for NE being up by 2% today).

Sometimes, with thinly-traded options that are near expiration, the bid is less than intrinsic value and you can't sell them for anything higher than that. For instance, I was trying to sell DJ 45 puts for $5.00 and didn't get filled until DJ was down to $39.86. In these cases, it makes sense...

Even if they don't sell order flow, they may send your order to a single option exchange regardless of who has the best bid or ask, further reducing your chance of being able to buy at the best ask, much less at the best bid. Several times at Ameritrade, I tried to buy at the best ask and...

If you're trading 100000 of a $1 to $3 stock, doesn't this mean the tick size is $.01 and every tick means a change of $1000? I think if you're dealing with that kind of money, looking for a broker that will give your order good execution is more important than saving $5 per trade.

Out of curiosity, I just went through my logs. Out of my ~900 option orders filled this year, 40 received price improvement. 39 at BOX, 1 at CBOE, 0 at ISE.

It is, although for Bulletin Board stocks the routing choices may be limited to NSDQ (INET) or ARCA. When I wanted to buy some Refco stock the day it dropped 99%, my Ameritrade order sat there while trades below my bid got printed. Finally had to go to Schwab to get filled.

Note that purchase price is US$27.85; the closing price you saw, $31.04, was in Canadian dollars. HUMC was above US$28 that day but dropped as word of the buyout git out. It's not unusual for speculators to bid the share price above what any buyer intends to pay. If the shareholders are...

How is trading in a 15-cent range the same thing as a stock being decimated?

.20 is less than half a percent of the underlying, which is quite small. It's not unusual to see bid-ask spreads of 1% to 2%, especially when the underlying stocks are volatile or thinly traded (e.g. TASR). Sure, you can place an order at any round multiple of .05 (or .10 if the price is > $3)...

What do you have to do to get a rate with a $0 ticket charge? I'd love to be able to direct orders to BOX to get price improvement and do it for $.75/contract.

With price quotes like .24, is this a bulletin board/pink sheet stock? As mentioned in http://elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=1013962 , quotes for these types of stocks are not firm. And a broker doesn't necessarily have access to all the market venues.

I trade SPY options. Lately the spread for options < $3 has been $.15. Retail traders occasionally step in and narrow the spread to $.10 (with size of 10 or 20, and that's fine for me). If the new rule will narrow that to .07 or .08, essentially splitting the spread in half, I'll take it.

The bid and ask change as people modify their orders. The last price only changes when there's an execution. People change their orders as conditions change, as frequently as several times a second, but an execution only occurs when two parties agree on a price, and there can be minutes or...